Venezuelan police forces raided the premises of the main Jewish community center in the country’s capital, Caracas, on the eve of a national referendum on Sunday. The raid on the ‘Hebraica’ occurred in the early hours of Sunday morning, only hours before Venezuelans went to the polls to decide on constitutional changes proposed by president Hugo Chávez. The raid took place as 900 Jews enjoyed an all-night wedding party at the nearby Union Israelita synagogue in the suburb of Altamira.
Agents of the DISIP secret police that investigates drug-trafficking and terrorism broke down the main gate of the building, allegedly looking for weapons and explosives. Officers searched the premises but found nothing. The constitutional amendments proposed by Chávez were rejected in Sunday’s referendum.
The World Jewish Congress and its regional branch, the Latin American Jewish Congress, expressed concern at the incident, calling it "an unjustified act of hostility and intimidation against a peaceful and hardworking community."
"The harassment of the Venezuelan Jewish community, through one of its central institutions, is ... unacceptable," LAJC president Jack Terpins, WJC president Ronald S. Lauder and WJC Governing Board chairman Matthew Bronfman said in a joint statement. The leaders also noted that a similar raid had occurred in 2004 at a Jewish primary school in Caracas, where police also found nothing while investigating a car bombing that killed a prominent prosecutor. "It seems absolutely incomprehensible and irrational," Claudio Epelman, executive director of the Latin American Jewish Congress, told the ‘Associated Press’ news agency, adding: “It causes profound unease in the community."
The Venezuelan Jewish umbrella organization, CAIV, called for a thorough investigation into the raid, which it said "tries to create unnecessary tensions between the community of Venezuelan Jews and the government”. According to the LAJC, Venezuela's Jewish community has shrunk from an estimated 22,000 people when president Hugo Chávez took office in 1999 to around 13,000 today.
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